For attaching a rescue stretcher to a lifting device, for example, to the tip of a turnable ladder of a fire fighting vehicle or to another kind of aerial lifting apparatus, lanyard assemblies are known that comprise a plurality of attachment elements. Typically the lanyard assembly comprises a lifting gear that is attached directly to the stretcher and comprises suitable fastening means, for example, carabiners to be engaged into different points at the rim of the rescue stretcher. For adapting the length of the lanyard assembly to the present rescue situation, a rope assembly is provided to connect the upper end of the lifting gear with the lifting device. The same arrangement can be used to any other kind of rescue apparatus, like a harness for lifting a person, for example. Just for the sake of simplicity, the following description only refers to rescue stretchers of the basket type, which shall not be understood as limiting the invention. It is noted here that the term “rope” shall not be understood here as limiting to any certain kind of material, including different kinds of long, stringy and/or fibrous materials of any kind of cross-section (flat, round, etc.) and any kind of natural or synthetic material and having a suitable tension strength for the purpose to which the present invention refers.
In a common embodiment, the rope assembly comprises two independent ropes guided in parallel, with their upper ends to be connected to the lifting device, and their lower ends being connectable to the lifting gear. The use of two ropes provides a redundancy in bearing the load, because each rope can take the load for its own in case of failure of the other one. The length of both ropes must be adapted such that during normal use, the load is distributed in equal shares to both ropes. Their length is often fixed simply by knotting each rope to shorten it. However, this simple technique often leads to the result that the ropes do not have exactly the same length, and the load is not equally shared between them. This problem occurs even more often when the whole assembly must be fixed under time pressure, typically in a rescue situation.